“This is what the festival needed,” says Raul Nino Zambrano, creative director of Sheffield DocFest, of his dual leadership role with managing director Annabel Grundy. “We really complement one another.”
Collaborating closely, they are building on the work done by the interim CEO Clare Stewart who came in to run last year’s festival following the departure of Cintia. Gill in the summer of 2021.
Zambrano and Grundy, previously project manager at the UK Global Screen Fund, are presiding over the 30th edition of Sheffield DocFest, taking place from June 14-19 in the UK.
From 2,500 entries, the programmers have chosen nine films for the international competition and nine for the first feature competition, most of them world premieres. The event opens with Paul Sng’s Tish, which looks at the life and work of the brilliant but under- appreciated UK photographer Tish Murtha, who died aged 56 in 2013.
‘It’s a really well-done, creative film,” says Zambrano.
Grundy notes: “It touches on themes around support for the arts, representation, big conversations which have been happening around working-class representation and who gets to come into the creative industries.”
Music documentary is again at the forefront of the programme. Premieres include Alison Ellwood’s Let The Canary Sing about Cyndi Lauper, Dalton’s Dream from Kim Longinotto and Franky Murray Brown, about singer and The X Factor star, Dalton Harris, and Chris Smith’s Wham!, an intimate look at George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley and how the young guns formed one of the UK’s best loved bands of the 1980s and 1990s. All these films will screen in Sheffield’s historic Crucible Theatre.
“Sheffield is a music town,” says Grundy. “We always see really strong public audiences for that strand and really good local engagement.”
The festival also regularly nurtures its own docs. Many of the films which screen in the main sections (including Dalton’s Dream) began as pitches in industry event, MeetMarket.
As the festival heads acknowledge, theatrical documentary has been struggling post-pandemic. “But the fact [some of the] streamers are starting to talk about theatrical windows is a strong sign of confidence in in-person audiences,” suggests Grundy. “We also directly respond to extending the theatrical lives of films through year-round activity. We do monthly screenings in Sheffield and we are expanding those to London next year. sometimes, you need a really long life to deliver an impact programme and reach the people you want to reach versus an entertainment documentary which might follow a more classical model.”
Zambrano believes documentaries are increasingly connecting with audiences - if they are carefully handled.
“It’s the way you present them and put them in context,” he says. “That is something we do very, very well. Part of our responsibility is to show that to distributors - that films which started with us could be a hit afterwards if they are given the attention they deserve.’
Alternate realities
Virtual reality (VR) will have a place at the festival through the Alternate Realities programme. This includes five-part VR series Missing Pictures which invites major filmmakers including Abel Ferrara, Tsai Ming- Liang, Catherine Hardwicke, Lee Myung-Se and Naomi Kawase to discuss the film they “didn’t get to make.”
“We see a lot of maturity this year in the VR projects,” reveals Zambrano. “The hype has gone so artists and developers have had the time to really work on things properly.”
As the festival prepares to celebrate its 30th anniversary, Grundy points out DocFest now extends beyond film. “We had quite considered conversations when we were talking about the 30th edition and we started talking quite a lot about what the future of the sector is, who are the future makers, what are we doing for talent, how is the form evolving and that is reflected in the programme,” she says. As well as the VR works, the festival will include the abridged verbatim play (’Jews. In Their Own Words’, created by journalist Jonathan Freedland), live podcast events, premieres of TV series and sit alongside the traditional documentary films.
Grundy and Zambrano credit the festival’s team of advisors and consultants with helping them to craft the programme. They include five programme consultants, all with experience as producers, progrmmers or curators, often all three. They are Ecuador’s Alfredo Mora Manzano, the UK’s Carmen Thompson, Mexico City-based Chloë Roddick, festival specialist John Badalu and British-Libyan artist, filmmaker and activist Naziha Karima Arebi. They are complemented by 15 programme advisors.
“The advisor model is something that we’ve really committed to,” Grundy explains. “We have a really, really broad representation of voices coming in. That helps cope with the volume of work but it goes back to listening to people, being relevant and including different voices in the cultural decision making.”
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